Who needs directors?

'Who needs directors? They are so often misinterpreting the way opera should be - carelessly, willfully, ripping a composer’s work out of the period in which he set it, just to egotistically, even narcissistically, put his or her perverse stamp on a treasured work of art.'

'Conductors are much nicer really, or if not nice, more respectful. Sure, they might play with the odd tempo, but they don’t destroy a work of art by removing it from its period. A few decades ago, they even advocated going back to the harpsichord to play Bach or Handel, rather than use the overblown dynamics of a romantic piano. Now that’s respect! The concert hall is a much safer place than the opera theatre.'

Extreme views perhaps, but of all the artistic issues that confront us, the subject of 'Director's Opera', or more particularly the issue of setting productions out of the time in which the composer or librettist set them, is by far the most persistently contentious. Perhaps it's a pity that an opera, or a play, cannot be like a painting or a good book. ('Why can’t a woman be more like a man?') We don't need anyone to do our interpreting for us when we look at a picture, or read War and Peace. Tolstoy knew what he wanted; and we know what we want when we read him; it’s all so simple really. And if we do want another person’s interpretation of War and Peace, we take our argument 'outside' – we put the book down and argue with our friends in our local reading group. We argue with them, that is, not with the book! The book remains itself, complete, untouched and undiminished by the insensibility of a 'mistaken' reader. Not like being held captive by someone else in the opera theatre, who, after all, is neither the composer, the librettist or us - who thinks he knows what's best, who tries to tell us how we should 'see' a work of art. With opera we take our arguments 'inside', into the heated arena of the theatre itself, because directing is, by its nature, argumentative, trying to persuade us of how we should experience a work.

I exaggerate of course, but the fear of a director's power over that which they have learned to hold dear is ever-present among many opera lovers.

Directors are unsettling precisely because we need them to realize an opera – a singular act of interpretation - but they start the conversation without us; and by the time we join they have hijacked our response.

As for the outcry about updated productions? Experience tells me that this is something of fall-back position when someone simply does not 'like' a production. For example, I have had no letters of complaint about Elijah Moshinsky's productions of Rigoletto or La traviata, both of which are set well outside their 'intended' periods. I certainly can't recall anything but approbation for Moffatt Oxenbould's production of Madama Butterfly, which is so subtly influenced by Japanese custom but a far cry from the 'realistic' interpretations of most Butterflys that we have seen. Baz Luhrmann's production of La boheme, set in the 1950s, or his radical shifting of Britten's A Midsummer Night’'s Dream to colonial India, live as vividly in the collective memory of our Company as they did when they inspired audiences in the early 90s.

All of which makes me think that the real issue is not about whether a Director has the temerity to update or dislodge a work from its intended setting. It's much more about the value of their interpretation once the transgression has been committed. If, as the years and centuries move on, we stuck slavishly to a set period for each master work of the repertoire, then the essential conversation we have with these great works would stultify beyond rescue. But if a Director chooses to set an opera or play out of its imagined milieu, he or she better have a very good reason for doing so – because the nuances of an imagined setting are so often what give depth to an otherwise banal perception.

No, I really believe it's not about updating or not updating; rather it's about productions that work and others that don't. When we don't like a production that has been 'updated', it’s usually something else we are objecting to.